Unreleased Cutz is a new and, if the entry on Wikipedia is anything to go by, short-running series of posts on akuhei bakery relating to unreleased or “lost” albums, from artists I like. And, for the most part, have had a least some of their tracks leaked, so I have something to post other than the oftentimes bizzare stories behind them. Huzzah!
It was December 1994. Californian pop-rockers Weezer had just released their debut, eponymous album (the first of many), and were riding high on the chart success of singles “Buddy Holly” and “Undone - The Sewater Songs” (with awesome videos by Spike Jonze). And how did they decide to follow it up? With a 15-17 track space-themed rock-opera, that’s how.
Singer/songwriter/lead guitarist Rivers Cuomo wrote and recorded the majority of Songs From The Black Hole, an album-long story about “three guys and two girls and a mechanoid - that are on this mission in space to rescue somebody, or something. The whole thing was really an analog for taking off, going out on the road and up the charts with a rock band, which is what was happening to me at the time I was writing this and feeling like I was lost in space.”
The characters themselves were all due to be played by various different people (although on Cuomo’s demos, all the parts were played by himself, which makes the leaked songs slightly hard to understand - scroll down for more on that).
The “three guys” were Jonas (voiced by Rivers), Wuan and Dondó (voiced by Brian Bell and Matt Sharp of Weezer), the two girls were Laurel (voiced by Rachel Haden of that dog.) and Maria (voiced by Joan Wasser, then of the Dambuilders, now of Joan As Police Woman) with the robot, “M1″, was due to be voiced by Karl Koch, a friend of the band and roadie at the time.
While writing the album, and simultaneously studying at Harvard (in a rock band and studying at an Ivy League school? That’s just showing off), Cuomo went off the whole cosmic-opera idea, and became more enthralled with Edwardian-era-opera Madama Butterfly, discarded the Songs From The Blackhole idea and went off to make Pinkerton.
Pinkerton, which was recieved with a wave of critical yawning upon release, featured four songs which were written before SFTBH, but had been changed to fit the theme of the album - “Tired of Sex”, “Getchoo”, “No Other One”, and “Why Bother?”, which were “unshaped” for Pinkerton. “Devotion”, “Waiting on You”, and “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” surfaced as b-sides to the Pinkerton singles “El Scorcho” and “The Good Life”.
Several tracks from the as-yet still unreleased album surfaced in 2002, and are available to download from the album’s unofficial site. A further five tracks appeared on the compilation album Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo last year, the sleevenotes of which explained some of the plot points of the musical.
This is probably the oddest of the albums I’m going to tackle in this series; my main criticism of Cuomo’s songwriting, and Weezer as a whole, over the years is his/their inability to grow up, and tackle more grown-up/different themes in his/their songs.
With Songs From The Blackhole, it seems Cuomo actually was trying something new - and this was only the second Weezer album! Pinkerton, while not as such a radical departure, was in fairness a bit of a change from The Blue Album; however, since then Weezer albums seemed to have just straddled the line between their first two albums, managing to sound the same both musically and lyrically for over ten years.
While the group’s third(!) self-titled album sounds like another not-as-such-a-radical-departure, but a bit of a change (for the good) nonetheless, perhaps now is the right time for Songs From The Blackhole to be released, and breathe some life into the flagging musical career of the once-proud group.
Choice Cutz (for you to download)
“Longtime Sunshine” - a lazy, sweet ballad, “about the singer’s dissatisfaction with life, wanting to return to times when things were more simple for them”. With sad, kazoo-sounding synths in the background. It’s better than it sounds.
“Blast Off” - more rockier, and far less subtle. Apparently, in the story of SFTBH it’sabout The lyrics are a conversation between the main character “Jonas telling his shipmates Wuan and Dondó how excited yet reserved about the prospect of doing what he thinks is his dream job. he is Wuan and Dondó are much more upbeat about the experience. In the middle of the song M1 (the robot) interjects to remind them of the task at hand. In the last verse we find that a female character, Maria, the ship’s cook, has entered the scene and that Jonas has a history with her from back at Star Corps Academy”.
Taken as a standard Weezer song, however, the idea of being “excited yet reserved” about “rocketing” to “space” is a fairly obvious metaphor for the rock ‘n’ roll fame Cuomo was being hurled in to, along with all the positive and negative aspects that go along with that.
Detailed tracklisting and synopsis on Wikipedia
Download all the leaked songs from the album
Buy Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo @ Play.com
